


Sonfall

by zvi



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Action, Character of Color, Gen, POV OC, science-fiction, teamfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-02
Updated: 2006-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:34:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zvi/pseuds/zvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aliens visit the solar-powered house of a middle-class family, and the house is suddenly sucked into a time warp that takes it back to prehistoric times</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sonfall

**Author's Note:**

> This is for xanphibian's [B-Movie Ficathon](http://xanphibian.livejournal.com/600629.html). My prompt:
>
>> The Day Time Ended
>> 
>> Aliens visit the solar-powered house of a middle-class family, and the house is suddenly sucked into a time warp that takes it back to prehistoric times.
>> 
>> Take the titles, characters, locations, plot, *whatever* and twist them to your own nefarious purposes. It's a prompt, not a set-in-stone kinda thing. Your fic can follow along with canon or be completely AU. It can be slash, het, or gen, and any rating. As long as it's 1000 words or over, anything goes!

Mitchka Renwo was very, very relieved when the aliens blew up her house. She had been told, from birth, that it was her destiny to be the Gatekeeper, to marry the Son, to record the comings and goings of her fellow Kligans, to greet and cater to the whims of those who came to visit and trade on Klik. She had been terrified of this prospect since the age of seven, when she realized that she did not like strangers.

So, her first thoughts after the blast were grateful ones. But once her ears stopped ringing and the world stopped spinning and the dust cleared, she realized that the Son's Gate was in front of her, where the Wayfarer's room and the rest of the house so clearly wasn't. And then she was mightily annoyed, because the aliens had blown up her room with her limited edition All-Klik blawdan team commemorative poster for nothing. She could only hope that in addition to the poster, which was not only a limited edition, but also personally signed by the entire team (becausing being the Next Gatekeeper had a _few_ benefits), they had managed to blow up the fucking visitor records. She wouldn't mind marrying the Son, which felt good, but she hated _welcoming_. The tall, pretty alien stood above her. There was dust in his hair and on his clothes, but nothing looked torn and there were no broken pieces attached to him, no scorch marks anywhere. He said, "You hurt?"

She thought about that, and realized that she didn't feel anything broken, but her arm felt wet. "I don't know," she said. "Can you see?"

He knelt beside her and felt along her limbs, pushed softly on her chest and belly, ran his fingers through her hair. "Nothing broken. I can't find any cuts." He pointed to the ground next to her, and she saw a slow bubbling up of water where her arm had been. "Just rinse off. Sheppard will have stuff to find out if it's safe for drinking." He smiled at her, quick and sharp, and she nodded back.

She rinsed her face and hands, and when she looked up, the woman alien and the boss alien were there. "How did you blow my house up?" said Mitchka. "You were just—it was supposed to be a _battery_ for the _eclipse_? How did you blow my house up with that?"

The boss twitched and looked away from her. "I didn't—"

"I do not believe," said the woman, "that Dr. McKay has blown your house up. Look." She pointed behind Mitchka, who turned to see that Allrest City had been replaced by a jungle.

* * *

"It's a temporal displacement, I'm pretty sure," said the boss.

"Can you put us back?" asked the alien who had been smily before they blew her house up. Or rather, traveled back in time to before the Gatekeeper's house.

"Why, of course, Colonel, I'll just wave my magic wand and the five of us will return to the year Atlantis 2, and have a chuckle about our little misadventure."

"So, I take it that's a no."

"Until I figure out how we got here in the first place, yes, that's a no." The boss grimaced and waved his hand. "You should go help Ronon and Teyla hunt food. Or take the girl and gather it, that'll be more useful. She'll have a better clue than you what's edible and what's not, and primitive hunter-gatherers always gathered more than they hunted."

Smily gave Mitchka a glance. She didn't know what he wanted, so she shrugged. He shrugged back and got to his feet, headed off toward the jungle. She looked back at the boss, who was frowning into one of the monitors he'd brought with him and examining the Son Dial. "Colonel, wait!" she said and scrambled after Smily.

He didn't stop, but he did slow down, and by the time he hit the tree line, Mitchka had caught up with him.

Smily spoke to her without looking at her. "Do you actually know anything about forests or edible plants or things? Allrest is the biggest city on Klik, right?"

She shrugged. "I was a Forest Runner and I made Nightsinger level, but I don't recog—." She stopped and pointed at a blue quinhog bush. "I know that bush, but it shouldn't _be_ here, if we're still near Allrest. That grows in the north, where my grandmother is." She walked to it and gestured him over. "Poke the bottom with your stick. Blue snakes live under it, but the leaves make a good tea." She frowned. "It keeps you awake; it's not really food, though."

They got back by dark and the woman and the pretty were there. The pretty had a fire going and was roasting several small, skinned animals over it. The boss was sorting things on a cloth, but Mitchka had no idea what.

"We've got veggies," said Colonel.

"Roots and fruits," said Mitchka. "There should be wild tloka and spran leaf for cutting and tall kriki, but I couldn't find any vegetables. I couldn't find norn or hipel trees either. This is like being at my grandma's house, and she lives way up north. I don't think we're in Allrest."

The boss shook his head, rolled up his cloth, and said, "Yes, yes, we are. This is, or, rather, will be Allrest, but we traveled about three, three and a half thousand years in the past."

The woman looked up from where she was doing something with some wood and something else, maybe some gut. "I believe he is correct, and we are in the place where the Gatekeeper's house will come to be. The natural features—the Spring of Refreshment, the bathing pools, the meditation caves—they are all where they should be."

Colonel looked at her, put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged away and he sighed. "Were there people living here then? Now? Should we be prepared to meet anyone?"

"No, Allrest was founded about two thousand years ago. Everyone will be south of here. This is the _Time of Shadows_. 'The sun was obscured and the planet was cold and the Son Gate did not work for a thousand years. Klik was alone in the universe, touched only by the Wraith.'" Mitchka shivered. Her favorite show was _Walk in Shadows_, but she somehow didn't think the adventures of Chef Ganta's ragtag band of outlaws would help out here. She wished she'd paid more attention in history class, but school wasn't that interesting if you knew what you were going to do when you grew up and your mother was teaching you the stuff that was important for your job.

"There was an eclipse?" said the boss, and his voice sounded funny when he said it, strangled and tight the way her sister Kelis had sounded saying, 'Congratulations' when the Son picked Mitchka over Kelis.

"Yes? I mean, there was an eclipse, and then a giant starfall, and the starfall kicked up dust for…a long time. And then there was a sunshower and the skies cleared, and then a starshower, but that turned out to be the Son's Return, not a regular starshower."

The boss' face was white and unhappy looking. Pretty snorted and pulled the meat off the fire. Colonel tensed up beside her, dropped his bag of roots. "McKay, what's wrong?"

"I think I figured out how we got here, and I thought it wouldn't be that difficult to get back. It might, unfortunately, be a year or two for us in this time now, but we would get back pretty much when we left, and it wouldn't be _hard_ to do, just waiting for a solar flare. Klik's sun has been in a high flare state for the past ten thousand years, so we just needed a powerful enough one, the kind they've been having every two or three years for the past five thousand years, so we should have been _fine_."

"But the dust cloud will block the flares?" said the woman, gently, softly.

"The sort of flare we'll need to get through a _planetary dust cloud_ of the sort that caused worldwide climate change occurs every 50-100 years. Which is longer than the lifespan of humans in the wild, so I figure we're going to die here."

"Oh," said Colonel.

"I see," said the woman.

"Meat's ready," said Pretty. He'd cut the meat loose and cracked the bones, piled the meat on one plate and the bones on another. "We can eat this while we wait for the roots to cook."

* * *

"Going through the forest to the southern cities is a bad idea," said Mitchka, waving her half-eaten tana root for emphasis. "There are giant graal, bigger than the Son Gate, and tiny, poisonous blil insects. We'd have to go about 2,000 miles, and then the citydwellers would be hostile and take us as slaves."

"I agree with her, at least for now," said Pretty. "The rainy season is about to start, and you shouldn't cross a forest in rainy season. You can't hear and you can't see and smells get carried from one place to another. If we're going to go, we should wait until after the rains. The Gate's on a hill. We can make the meditation caves our shelter, or rig something from wood if those will flood."

Colonel swallowed audibly and said, "So, why don't we go to another planet? Not Atlantis, but your people have trading partners who've had settlements for thousands of years, Teyla. Hell, the Athosians should have a large enough settlement to absorb five adults now."

The woman shrugged. "Yes, there are places to go, but…" she frowned and shook her head. "We have nothing to sell but ourselves. We are two soldiers, a hunter-warrior, a technician, and a half-trained hostess. No one will hire all five together, and we cannot abandon Mitchka. She is here because of us." She bit her lip. "There are places where Rodney or Ronon might be able to earn enough to support five, but that was—will be—true in the future. I do not know if it is true now."

"We could wait," said the boss.

"What?" said Colonel.

"We shouldn't gate to another planet, and we can wait here. For a while.

"Look, this gate is powered differently from most Stargates. Where most Stargates are powered by a large naquadah bank, this one is solar powered. We have the naquadah power core I brought to Klik to install in the Gatekeeper's house as trade with Klik, but that's enough to power this gate one time. Once we gate out, we won't be able to gate back in. That's why Klik was isolated during the Time of Shadows, not enough energy to sustain a wormhole. And if we can't use the unusually active solar potential of Klik's sun, we will never get back to our own time.

"But, I was able to refine my calculations, and we came back a little less than three thousand years in the past. How long ago was the Time of Shadows?"

Mitchka blinked. "Um." Then she laughed. "Oh, I'm stupid. The Son's Return is the year one, and you came in 2952. So, we should be in good shape." But she looked around and frowned. "But if this is the year one, or after, where is the Son?"

"Uh, Mitchka?" said Colonel. "What exactly is the Son?"

Mitchka shrugged. "The Son is the Son, the hailer of light, the bringer of trade, the gift of the Ancestors to work their Gate."

The boss snorted and said, "God save me from religious types."

"Rodney!" said Colonel and the woman at the same time.

The boss rolled his eyes, but then said, in the most polite and least sincere tone she'd heard him use, "Mitchka, I apologize." He looked toward the woman and she nodded. "Can you physically describe the Son? Because we thought he was a person, someone Klik had a treaty with or something."

Mitchka laughed at him. "A person? The Son is," she moved her hands to describe a rectangle with roughly the same dimensions as Pretty's torso, "a container, of the same metals as the Gate and the Son's Dial, with symbols much like theirs. Inside it contains crystals of several colors, but they are not the same as any stones or gems found on Klik, which surround a strip of metal the size of my small fist. The Son is heavy, much too heavy for its size; when they moved it to the Gate, five grown men had to work together. It makes the Gate work, and this can be done by having them touch directly, but that is not good. Or the Son can work through the Gatekeeper, and that works better. Our family has been the Gatekeeper for five hundred years, but every child in Allrest is presented to the Son on her twelfth birthday, to see if the Son makes a different choice for Next Gatekeeper. Some people from outside Allrest bring their children, too, but," she shrugged, "they're usually freaky religious fanatics."

The boss choked, and Pretty whacked him good on the back. "Oh, yes, Ronon, because I need a broken rib to help with my asphyxiation, thank you." Pretty just rolled his eyes and stole food off the boss' lap. "In any case, that changes things _again_ and we should definitely not leave Klik."

"Why?" said Colonel. The woman looked the question without saying anything. Pretty just rooted through the fire some more, but Mitchka could tell he was listening a little harder than he had been.

"Because she just described an Ancient energy maximizer, and with one of _those_ we would only need a lightning strike to get back to the future, and, so help me god, Colonel, if you make a joke about the fucking delorean, I will put out your eye."

"No you won't, Rodney, but neither will I."

"No, I won't and you totally will, sometime when I'm least expecting it."

Colonel just smiled and shrugged. "So where did they find the Son, Mitchka?"

Mitchka shrugged. "There's a park in the old city with a monument to its discovery, but," she pointed to the forest, "go left on Ganta street doesn't mean anything now."

Pretty pulled one tiny root out of the fire, and it was blackened and crispy and she could tell just from looking at it it would be sweeter than candy. He handed it to her and said, "Yes, it does." He pulled a tourist's map out of his pocket. "Tell me where I've got to go."

* * *

The Son was not in the place Sonfall park would one day be, and Mitchka was on the verge of tears. She kept herself from tears by looking at Pretty, and thinking how he would despise her if she cried. Pretty was the only one of the aliens who did not also look as if he were about to cry. The other three looked like they wanted to run into a blil nest and get it over with.

They were sitting in a small, moss-covered clearing, catching their breath. The boss had his shoes off, rubbing his feet and muttering to himself. The woman was working again on her wood. And Colonel was 'keeping watch' which seemed to mostly consist of looking into the distance and clutching his big, black weapon to himself. Pretty was digging around in the bag he carried. He pulled out some knives, and some tana root, and a few klil berries, and a metallic vessel of some kind.

"McKay, start a fire. Teyla, cut up the roots. The girl and I are going to see if we can't catch some of those ground rodents they keep as pets. Somebody told me they're a southern delicacy, so we can give them a try."

The migraal were delicious, as long as Mitchka didn't think about her sister's pet Nene, so she looked at Pretty while she ate. Pretty was looking back at her and it was nice, to think maybe he was interested, even if she couldn't do anything about it. She couldn't be with visitors until she married the Son to the Gate by herself the first time, and became the Gatekeeper in her mother's stead, and that wouldn't be for years yet.

"Mitchka!" said the boss.

She flushed and looked at the others. The other three were finished eating—Pretty was on his third helping, which was why he wasn't done yet—and they looked at her expectedly. "Sorry."

"I asked how sure you were about the time and the place of the Son's return. On Earth, stories get changed in two or three thousand years, details get lost. I have to figure out if your information is bad or if my calculations are bad."

"I don't know." Mitchka hung her head, stuffed food in her mouth. "I'm not a good student. Kelis is the smart one. She wanted to help you install your energy thing, but Mother said I had to do it, since I'm the Next Gatekeeper. You would have been better off with her, she could tell you all about the history of the Son."

"Fuck," said Colonel, and the other three nodded.

Mitchka sniffed, but she didn't cry.

* * *

They had fish when they got back to Gatehill. Pretty had set a few traps before they left for the park, and they were full by the time they got back.

The boss was talking. "So, either the Son landed someplace else in the city, or it was brought to Sonfall by someone who didn't make it into the history books, or we're here before the Son's Return. So, it makes the most sense for me to try to figure out more exactly when we're here, and for you four to look for the Son."

"Can you do your calculations without your monitor? Because it'll be easier to find the only energy source for miles around with an energy detector. I mean, we can just do a thorough grid search, but that could take months."

"And my calculations will take no more than a week, Colonel, I think the delay is worth it. If we're here after the Son's Return, we'll have to expand our search beyond Allrest. And wouldn't you like to know that starting out?"

'We need to start thinking about putting a more permanent camp together. Rainy season's coming soon," said Pretty.

There was something in the way he said that that was just like her brother Nik asking when he could finally start playing blawdan, and it hit Mitchka, all at once, that Nik was gone, as sure as if he was dead. From Nik's point of view, _Mitchka_ was dead, and that tore it, she choked on her fish, once, twice, spit it out,  and got up and left the fire.

She heard one of the aliens follow her, but she didn't look back to see which one, just went straight to her favorite meditation cave, the one with the little rock seat that it turned out, wasn't there yet, and she cried until she fell asleep.

"Mitchka, wake up," rumbled a voice above her.

She opened her eyes and said, "Hello, Pretty," before she quite woke up.

He raised one eyebrow and said, "My name is Ronon. Come look. Come tell us if this is it."

"What? Sleep. It's still dark out."

He shook his head. "No, it's not," and he picked her up and carried her outside in his arms.

It was a starfall, but not just any starfall. Everyone knew what Son's Return looked like, there were paintings and pictureshows and danceplays so every Kligan child knew what it looked like when the Eastern half of the sky filled with streaks of red and gold and blue coming down and down and down. "On the southern edge of the rain of stars came a star so big, so white, so close the hunters went to search for it. They found a circle, giant and black, and in the center, red hot was the Son," she whispered. And she pointed to where she saw the Son coming down.

"How big is the circle, Mitchka?" asked Colonel.

Mitchka jumped, then clutched tighter to Ronon. "What?"

"How big is the big, black circle?"

"From the center of Sonfall park to," and Mitchka woke up in the middle of her sentence and screamed. "From the center of Sonfall Park to the top of the meditation caves."

Colonel took off the for the campsite, and Ronon put her down and pulled her north. "We're going to the river, Sheppard! As far downstream as we can get before it lands."

They made it to the river, all five of them, and the boss had grabbed his tools. The woman mentioned it as they stood on the other side of the river, watching the flames flow through the valley. Mitchka turned her back on it pretty quickly. She knew, in her head, that no one lived there yet, that the Art Museum and the Game Arcade and her favorite piestand had not even been dreamed of yet, but it felt like one more destruction of everything she had known.

When Ronon asked her if she wanted to go hunting, she said yes.

They had bad luck. All the game had run because of the fire, and the air was dim with soot and smoke. After about two hours of fruitless wandering, it started raining. Mitchka turned around and kicked a tree. "I am so tired of bad things happening. Kelis asked to trade me, she was going to give me her blawdan glove for a _tenday_ if I let her watch you do the batteries. But I was afraid of mother, so I said no, and nothing has gone right since."

Ronon laughed at her and turned around, headed back toward the new camp. "This," he pointed up, "is not bad luck."

Mitchka looked at him for a moment, and then remembered that their problem was a giant fire, and felt stupid.

* * *

The next morning, they picked up what little was at the new camp, mostly the boss's bag of stuff, and headed back to Gatehill.

The fire hadn't reached the foot of the hill, let alone the meditation caves. Mitchka tripped when she realized and did not get up from her fall. The boss stopped beside her and offered her a hand. She looked at it, looked at him, and closed her eyes.

"Oh, this is ridiculous. I realize you're an adolescent and thus subject to the unpredictable whims of hormonal imbalance, but are you seriously planning to lay down and die because you _tripped_? I've known brain-damaged ocelots that were more helpful than you, but, however unreliable, you are our only source of ancient Kligan history, so dying is not an option. Sorry, get up. Move."

"This isn't it! This isn't Son's Return. We're going to be stuck in the past forever, and everyone I know won't be born for thousands of years until after I die, and I _quit!_"

The boss stared at her for a minute, and then laughed, the mean, sharp titter that was just another way to say how stupid she was. "Oh, don't be ridiculous, Mitchka. _We_ do the fire damage to Gatehill, when we gate to the future. I'm actually far more optimistic about this whole enterprise since I first figured out when we were. This undamaged, verdant hillside is a sign that we make it back, so, I say again, get up!" He thrust his hand further forward this time, almost touching her. She took it.

* * *

The Son still wasn't in Sonfall park. It was further out, near the Menlo reservoir. The boss waved that off, said obviously the rainy season filled the depression and then the river moved to permanently fill it sometime later, before the the hunters that found the Son got there. It took the five of them three days to walk it to Gatehill park in the rains, and she and Colonel and Ronon and the woman spent a lot of time in the hot baths for the three days it took the boss to hook the Son up to the gate directly.

"It's a bad idea, to hook the Gate to the Son directly," said Mitchka at dinner, the night she realized what the boss was doing.

"Why?" he asked.

"If you hook the Gate and the Son together, the Gate gets…hot," she said and shrugged. "I'm not sure exactly. Nobody's done it for two thousand years. The Gatekeeper just marries the Son once a day."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Do you know how to marry the Son?"

She shook her head.

"What happens if you marry the Son the wrong way?"

She looked away from him, into her bowl of fish soup. "The Gatekeeper dies."

He snorted. "I'll monitor the Gate's temperature and disconnect if it starts to warm up."

And it stayed like that for a tenday. She and Ronon went out to trap game, the woman and Colonel gathered materials to make a more permanent shelter, and the boss kept fiddling with the Gate. They all had to run to the Gate whenever there was a thunderstorm, waiting for that bolt of lightning.

The Gate started to heat before the lightning came. She wasn't there when it started, she and Ronon were cleaning fish, but the woman ran down to them and said, "Dr. McKay needs your immediate assistance."

Mitchka ran up the hill after her, Ronon pacing her the whole way. Colonel was standing at the Son's Dial, pressing in the address for Klik over and over. The boss was pulling wires from the Gate and the Son, but Mitchka could see the naked power arcing between them. She ran up and put her hand on the Son's face and the other on the Gate. The boss shouted at her, but she could only see his mouth move for a second, then she went blind as well as deaf.

She felt the power push through her, like when the Son chose her over her sister, but more. It was a home feeling, like a kiss from her mother, but more than that, like blil vinegar was more than regular tiktik vinegar. She married the Son and the Gate, and it was good. Then, suddenly, there was something else, someone with her and the Song and the Gate. She couldn't figure out what, but then the world whited out and she was gone.

* * *

Mitchka woke up in a bed and she hurt so bad. "Give me some tea," she whispered. Tried to. It came out more like a croak, but ice chips were put in her mouth, ice chips made from norn juice. She tried to open her eyes, because something had changed.

"It's me, Mitki," said Kelis. "You're back now. You're burned pretty bad, inside and out, but you'll be okay. The aliens have promised to help with your medical repair. Your eyes are taped shut, but you should have normal vision in a couple of weeks."

Mitchka Renwo relaxed for the first time in a week. She was so very, very glad to be home.


End file.
